Contents

All But My Life

Gerda Weissmann Klein

Table of Contents

Plot Overview

All But My Life is Gerda Weissmann Klein’s memoir of her
experiences during World War II. Klein was born on May 8, 1924, in Bielitz (now
Bielsko), Poland. She remembers her childhood as being happy, even idyllic. The
Weissmanns were a Jewish family, and their town had been part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire before 1919. Like most of the residents in the area, the
Weissmann family was bilingual, speaking both Polish and German, and Klein’s older
brother, Arthur, studied English as well. Klein’s father, Julius, was a business
executive who had lived in Bielitz for more than twenty years, and Helene, her
mother, was born there, as were both Klein and Arthur. The family was horrified when
German Nazi forces invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Despite the fact that
Britain and the United States declared war on Germany two days later, it took the
Nazis only eighteen days to conquer Poland.

Soon afterward, the entire Jewish population of Bielitz was forced to register
with the police, and soon, sanctions were imposed against the Jews. First, they were
required to turn in all gold, automobiles, bicycles, and radios. Many Jews were
forced out of their homes, and the local temple was burned down. In October of 1939,
all Jewish men between the ages of sixteen and fifty were forced to register,
whereupon they were sent in cattle cars to rebuild parts of Poland that had been
destroyed by Allied attacks. Klein’s brother was sent to the interior of Poland in
one of these transports. In December, the Weissmann family was forced to move into
the basement of their home, while the woman who had been their laundress took over
the main house. After Christmas, the Nazis restricted the local Jewish population’s
food supply by stamping their ration cards with the word “JEW,” entitling them to
less than half the amount of food that non-Jews received. Their coal rations were
also cut, and they were forced to wear blue and white armbands and, later, yellow
stars that identified them as Jews.

Before the war began, Bielitz had a Jewish population of nearly 8,000 people.
As news of the German treatment of Jews reached them, however, more and more Jews
fled to the Russian-occupied parts of Poland that had not been claimed during the
German takeover. By the spring of 1940, the Jewish population in Bielitz had
dwindled to little more than three hundred people, most of them children and the
elderly. Like Klein’s brother, all of the young men had left in the transports. The
young female population was declining as well, as more and more families left or
sent their children out of the country. On April 19, 1942, all of the remaining Jews
in Bielitz were ordered to move into a newly constructed Jewish ghetto. In May of
1942, shortly after Klein’s eighteenth birthday, all Jews were required to register
for work. Those who did not comply were sent to Auschwitz, a nearby concentration
camp intended to enable the Nazis to kill those people who were deemed not useful to
the German cause. Soon, the Weissmann family was told that they would be sent to
camps in order to make Bielitz Judenrein—free of Jews. Klein’s
father and mother were taken to death camps, where they were killed, along with one
to three million others.

Poland was the center of the Jewish Holocaust, and Auschwitz, Treblinka,
Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Birkenau, the infamous concentration camps, were all
located there. The survival rate for Jews living in Poland during the war was lower
than in any other country. Poland’s Jewish population dropped from 3,500,000 to just
50,000 by the end of the war. At the same time that her parents were taken to
Auschwitz, Klein and many other young Polish people were taken to labor camps, where
they became slaves forced to work for the German war effort. As it became obvious
that Germany was losing the war, the Germans started dismantling the camps and
forcing the prisoners onto marches that became known as “death marches” because of
their extremely high mortality rate. In the winter of 1945, more than four thousand
young women were forced onto a three-hundred-mile “death march” from a number of
labor camps in Germany and Poland to Czechoslovakia. Among them was Gerda Weissmann
Klein—one of only 120 women in her group of 2,000 who survived this march.
Klein and the other women were liberated by American troops—including one
soldier who eventually became Klein’s husband in the spring of 1945.

All But My Life is Klein’s memoir of the period from September 3,
1939, two days after the Nazi invasion of Poland, until September of 1945. In 1946,
Klein moved to Buffalo, New York, with her husband, Kurt Klein, where she began
working to raise awareness about the Holocaust, prevent hunger, and promote
tolerance. She quickly formed ties with a number of Jewish groups and began
lecturing about her experiences as a young woman during the Holocaust. First
published in 1957, Klein’s story was the basis for the Academy Award-winning
documentary One Survivor Remembers. Klein also went on to write a
number of other books, including a collection of her correspondence with her
then-fiancé, Kurt Klein, before their marriage in 1946.

All But My Life is just one of many memoirs written in the decades
immediately following the end of World War II. In 1995 the memoir was revised and
re-released with an epilogue describing Klein’s post-war life.

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